Covid-19 Crisis as a Threat to the Economic Security of the Citizen, the State and the World

Abstract

The aim of the article was to identify the main threats to the economic security of citizens, the state and the world, caused or reinforced by the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis and the related lockdown, as well as by unprecedented actions taken as part of the economic policy of states. The research used the method of statistical comparative analysis of economic data and the method of content analysis. On this basis, using inductive inference, an attempt was made to identify the main threats to the economic security of citizens, the state and the world related to the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 crisis will deepen the debt crisis, with less credible countries, businesses and citizens paying the price. This will increase the instability and vulnerability of weaker countries and their entities to turbulence in the global economy. This will exacerbate the problem of social stratification in a single country and the distance in the development between weaker countries and highly-developed ones with developed and/or wealthy financial markets. The next gigantic stimulus packages of governments and additional money printing by central banks will loosen the discipline in economic policy, which will further discourage people from working and slow down the progress of civilization. This will limit business growth and marginalize equity markets. It will increase the acceptable level of indebtedness and intensify the phenomenon of investment risk in financial markets reaching an extreme level, which will increase the frequency and scale of subsequent crises. Is there any positive? Although the coronavirus crisis will result in bankruptcies of some enterprises, it will be an opportunity for other, new, creative and technologically advanced ones. Therefore, this time we shall allow the world economy to at least partially eliminate ineffective solutions hampering the world’s social and economic development and, finally, begin to educate societies from an early age in the financial and economic sphere, so that a greater part of economic entities would be able to resist the next crisis and use it as an opportunity for development.